


The Soulwriter

by septemberwish



Series: The Soulwriter Series [1]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Accused rape, Frerard, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 13:43:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/septemberwish/pseuds/septemberwish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Mister Gerard Way, you have been accused of the sexual assault of Mister Andrew Lee Roth Finn."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The cab driver's hair was dyed black. Shittily done, too, probably at a cheap salon, or with the thick oozing kind of hair dye that you could buy at local grocery stores and attempt to apply at home. The kind that twelve year old kids looking to survive in a world of supposedly exaggerated darkness would buy in hopes of fitting in, or rather, the opposite. The kind I used to buy myself, and got told off by the school principal. Oh...if only they knew what they'd be saying later, they'd have thought the hair was nothing. But the driver's was careless, and messy, and had a bit too much gel in it. But it was the kind people used to survive in a dank and grimy world like this one. Yes, this man was merely an attempt for survival, and that made me hate him even more. 

"Where to?" he asked in a too loud voice, running a mucky hand through his black slimy hair, making me visibly cringe. It looked to me as if slugs were crawling atop his scalp.

"I don't care," I said, and climbed in, my bag of possessions in one hand, and a shameful packet that I tried to hide in the other.

I quickly stuffed my papers into the knapsack, drawing it tight, and then crossing my legs in a business-like manner. I was donned in what I'd worn a long time ago, as in a LONG time ago: a sweaty Misfits shirt, a black hoodie jacket, and skinny jeans. It had been quite a long while since I'd worn skinny jeans, and they felt odd on me now, rough, and a bit baggy too, pretty much dedicating my legs to the name. SKINNY jeans.

"Yeah, listen, brother," the man said in a slightly New Yorkish accent. "Where the hell d'you wanna go? I don't care if you don't care, I need goddamn directions, ya dramatic flit."

"Right," I said. "Anywhere that has a vicinity where it is quite unlikely that I will be discovered."

The cab driver stared at me like I was a drug dealer, or a murderer, or some terrorist, or summat. Or, you know, a dramatic flit.

"My girl," I said, letting lies flow out easy as they had come years before, and giving up my entire vocabulary at that moment (though it had saved my ass, well, nearly). "See, she cheated on me with some scumbag from Cali, an I catch her humping this bigshot with bleach blonde hair, and one of them commercial smiles, you know? So she says to me, "Arthur, I love you, I promise." And I slam that goddamn door in her smug face. Took me bout a week to recover, see, we WERE in love, the real kind, you know? So I decided to get away. Change myself. Change who I was. Change who I was around her, you know what I mean?"

"Goddamn dramatic," mumbled the man. "We're close to Jersey, little dirty city full of scumbags close to the likes of your girl."

He meant prostitutes, I knew. But Jersey....that was a different idea altogether. I had pictured myself getting on a flight to some Scottish lowland or changing my name to Gina and dressing as a girl, like I did back in art school. People were downright nice to me then....but I didn't want to be some pretty girl who couldn't talk, like that red-headed mermaid who sold her voice to the devil in that Disney movie. That killed me. How you could give away something that precious, something that could fill other people, something that could create! And to sell it for love at first sight... Plus her hair colour totally came from a fucking bottle.

I glanced out the window. It was too dark to see anything but rain, really. Rain and the glows of headlights and red lights and blinkers and street lamps. This usually combined to make a rat-a-tat-tat glow of colour on your window. It was art. I loved art and I hated art...no, I loved art itself, I only hated the memories that art brought back to me. Shitty art. No, I was lying to myself. It was very good art...very good art indeed...

His name was Andrew Lee Roth Finn. He had enough names for two people, or four Beyonces, and he could make fucking art. Not in the way that kids in high school did, you know, cartoon characters on their binders, or doodles that they hung up in their lockers, he was different. 

Sometimes I'd catch him doing sketches, of kids in the cafeteria that I doubted he even knew, but he could let loose the emotions inside of them, somehow knowing what they were feeling, somehow emptying their soul into his, and emptying his into the paper. Other times he would be humming a melody in class, writing down lyrics, tapping a pencil, twirling a casual finger through his shaggy hair, dyed survival black,  grinning at whoever passed by. No, not whoever passed by. Me. Grinning at me. 

I didn't pretend I could hear no whispers in the hall or even during classes throughout my teaching career.

"Did you see that new teacher...Mister Way?" one girl would giggle.

"Oh, hell yeah! He's the hottest one yet." another would say, smirking at her friend.

And some of the cheekier boys, knowing what was up.

"He's a terrible grader, that new teacher. What a douche." said one  sexist dickhead, his name forgotten.

"He is not! He grades fair!" the next girl would say.

"Oh, yeah, Janice? I know what grade you want him to give you."

And an even more hushed whisper, for dramatic effect.

"A D."

I realised, yes, I could have been, no probably was, the youngest teacher in the school. Maybe even the best looking male English teacher the school had gotten in years. Girls could have checked me out once or twice during a test. Hell, I didn't pretend it wasn't weird as fuck if a kid stole a glance at me in the halls. I paid no attention, led no stupid hormonal girl on, and it passed. But then it happened. IT was a day in April, nearing the end of the year, and I was keeping Andrew after school. 

Andrew and I were close friends. Teachers can be friends with students, no matter how strange it sounds. Andrew stayed after school on Wednesdays and Thursdays to do advanced English, and on Fridays to help me with other things in my classes. I'd teach him Shakespeare, and he'd wipe the whiteboard, and we'd talk. 

I'd smile back.

***

"Hello, Mister Way," he said, the same day.

No, he didn't call me that, he called me Gerard.

"Hello, Gerard," he said.

"Yes, Andrew?" I said lightly.

I was grading a test and did not want to risk fudging up the ink once again. 

"Yes," I repeated, stopping my pen work and giving the boy my full attention.

"I'd like to share with you a poem I wrote, you know, like in the plays you've been giving me, by Shakespeare. I really liked some of his stuff and I tried my hand, and really, you're the best writer I know...."

His words came fast and trailed away even quicker.

My smile was genuine. I couldn't pretend that I didn't love it when kids were inspired by a work of art, lest it be a painting, a sketch, a sculpture, a play, or even a bent paperclip they found on the floor after math class.

Andrew nodded and slid me the paper.

"Read it aloud," I said, encouragingly.

I believed that art was meant to be spoken, meant to be heard. No wonder it was a silent occupation that got practically no recognition for its worth.

Andrew cleared his throat. He was a shy kid, talented, but shy. 

"I would break for curfews still built for broken glass.  
But brokenness is in the heart of the fixed,   
And I am not whole, never shall be.  
I would kiss for good nights still built for sleep-tight-kisses.  
But kissing is in the heart of the full,  
And I am empty, always will be.  
I would wish for says in days when broken heart strings can be replaced and no longer bleed the blues...and the reds...and the pinks....  
Blood is in art, and you are meant to share art with those you love.  
So on a second glance, why are we still not built for love?"

I cleared my throat. The boy's eyes were shining and he was looking straight at my mouth, as if he was expecting immediate and beautiful feedback...but he was not looking for words.  
   
"It was beautiful," I said. It's an overused word, really, and it left a shadow cast upon Andrew Finn's face.

And then, on a Friday, exactly one dreadful week later, I was bidding him goodbye and good luck on a test we were having the follow week, when the principal, who at the time, was called Gary Clevely, laid a solemn hand on my shoulder, and said, calmly: "Come to my office, please."

I obeyed.

"Mister Way, what is your relationship with Mister Finn?"

"He's in my fifth period English class," I began. "A bright kid, so he stays after for Advanced English lessons. He certainly knows a lot about how to go about creating art, and-"

"I'm going to stop you right there," Clevely said, holding up a hand. "Mister Way, are you aware of what you have been accused of?"

"No, sir," I said, staring blankly at the man, raising my eyebrows ever so slightly.

"Mister Gerard Way, you have been accused of the sexual assault of Mister Andrew Lee Roth Finn."

***

"Sir, we've arrived."

"Oh, y-yes," I said, standing up and smiling.

"Excuse me?" said the man.

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry," I said, in a not-so-terribly-sorry voice, and pulled out the money from not-so-skinny jeans to pay him.

I was incredibly forgetful when it came to materialistic things, such as money, or food, or toys, even as a child. I think I left one of my action figures outside for perhaps a month, and when I found it again Batman was covered in Robin shit. 

"Thank you, sir," I meant to say, but it came out "thnk yar" and he barely noticed before mussing his disgusting hair and driving off into the night.

He had dropped me off by a book store. I loved books. I read a lot as a kid, okay, maybe I read comic books, but they had just as much of a plot, maybe more. Not to mention the adding in of art. I loved art, and I loved making it more. I remember drawing comic book sketches during math classes and even my rejected piece for Cartoon Network, Breakfast Monkey. It was awesome as fuck, but it was rejected. R E J E C T E D. Rejected is a sick word to me, and most people try to sugarcoat it, ending up with some sickly sweet mess; it is the  cough syrup of declination. Rejected is for permission slips, novels, art pieces, college applications, people. Rejection is the worst when you are with people. People that you love and people that attempt to love you, and one or both end up with rejection written on their heartstrings as they bleed the blues....or the reds....or the pinks.....

"Read," read the sign, simply. 

I could oblige to that.

I looked for an open sign, and there was none, but the door appeared to be unlocked, and when I swung it open, a bell above the door made a rather irritating tinkling sound. The store was empty, or so I thought, so I decided to browse through the vast shelves for interesting books that caught my eye. But it was no book that caught my eye...nor my heart.

"Excuse me," said a voice.

I turned to see a short kid, maybe sixteen, standing in front of me.

"How old are you?" I said incredulously.

The kid looked down at himself, smirking at his feet as if they held some significance to his shortness.

"Almost eighteen come October," he said, with a sharp New Jersey giggle in his voice.

"Oh," I said.

"What are YOU doing here?" he said, emphasing the 'you' as though I had asked him what he was doing in a book shop at about midnight.

"Looking for a book," I said innocently.

"Oh," he said. "I work here, late nights. This bookstore's open til about three, and I'd rather leave early, but browse all you like."

He said the last bit in a sort of bitter tone, as if he was forced to say the sentence by whomever owned the store itself.

"Actually," I said, enticed by the Kid's bitterness. Bitter people make beautiful art. "I was looking for a job in this city."

"Hell, sir, with all due respect, you could get a better job selling it for a nickel on the street."

"I like books," I said, with a waver in my voice. "Books are captured art that you can look at for a time without being judged or forced to do it yourself."

"Who said that?" said the kid.

"I did," I said. "How about a job?"

"Right, then," the kid said. "My father owns the place, I'll ask around. We're usually open for a job, as I, as his fucking son, have to take a shift."

He put down a stack of books that he had been carrying on a wooden table ready to collapse and put out a hand.

"Iero," he stated. "Frank Iero."

"Gerard," I said, smiling slightly.

"I like your shirt," was all he said in return.

 

 

  


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Song: Sleeps With Butterflies by Tori Amos.
> 
> (each chapter will now have a song, hooray! creativity!)

"It is, in your best interest, to lie about the case," said the attorney sitting across from me.

"I don't lie in court," I said.

The man, named Alexander Sullivan, or so his business card said, was flexing his fingers, putting his hands together and bending them in and out. It made his fingers look like a spider doing pushups on a mirror. He took a deep breath, which turned into a deep sigh.

"You may not wish to lie, Mister Way, but you can, and you will."

***

I entered the bookshop with another tinkle of the shop bell, bumping into Frank, who looked as if he was suffering from a headache and a lack of sleep, probably going to school. He passed bye me without a twinge of interaction whatsoever. Teenagers, always scaring the living shit outta me and intriguing me at the same time.

At the desk of the shop sat a slightly overweight man with no smile and no emotion either. He didn't have enough hair to be dyed, even survivally.

"You're the man who came looking for a job, then?" he said in a thick voice, shifting his weight in his chair.

"Yes," I said, shifting uneasily.

"Good," he said. "We're behind on unpacking. We've been looking for staff for weeks. But no one wants to work at a shitty bookstore like this, hardly one in this part of town. Don't know myself why you are, young guy like yourself. Anyway, get to work afore I kick you out. There's a brand new shipment of books in the back. ABC order, and categorised sections, not Dewey. We'll be paying minimum wage, we don't get many customers, little profit, but you know, 'Read!'" He gestured to the sign in the window, which flickered red, hanging backwards from this side. "You can read, right?"

"Course," I said, and the man nodded, despite the fact that he looked as if he had never touched a single book in his entire life.

There was quite a large shipment of books in the back, stacked inside cardboard boxes and smelling like new ink. The first I pulled out advertised a busty model with up-close sharp teeth, grinning around her scene-girl hair.

"Oh, god," I muttered, picking up the book and its wide variety of copies and sequels, which looked just as bad.

I placed the stack on a cart, which I figured was for the purpose I intended, and wheeled it to the section that read "TEEN PARANORMAL ROMANCE." Well, motherfucking shit, better invest in buying all two hundred fucking billion of those books about tamed down vampire and angel and witch love stories. Love isn't intended for monsters. Love can turn people into monsters, but that is not its intent.

I headed back to the boxes and boxes only to find a book on top that looked, well, decent.

***

The phone rang. Sullivan leaned over his desk, his skinny frame bending slightly, and picked it up.

"Yes," he said into the phone. "I see....goddamnit...that's not gonna go by well....goddamnit...okay....check his files, and Way's too, see what you can find on either of them....call me back if you get anything."

He slammed the phone down.

"Shit."

***

"I'd like to buy this one," I said, placing it on the counter.

"You a goddamn customer?" said the man, who I guess was Frank's dad.

I took the book off the counter and filed it and its copies under Young Adult.  Teenagers were the ones who deserved books. They still had life. They were still free of rejection. In that moment I took one of the copies and copies and slid it into my jacket, replacing it with a five dollar bill. It wasn't enough to pay for the book, but it was enough to pay for my crime. Five...that was payment enough in years, why not dollars?

I categorised books quickly, feeling the heavy weight of the stolen book in my jacket. I didn't know how many hours I was working, but the book slapped against my chest as I leaned down to shelve, making a beat to my work, ticking like a clock. 

Slap...slap....slap...slap...

"Hello."

The voice startled me, making me drop a book and causing the book in my jacket to slide right out.

"You stealing that book?" said Frank Iero, picking it up.

"I-I paid for it, I swear, it's just-"

"Billy," said Frank. 

I looked at him questioningly.

"He works the counter during the day. He's strict as fuck and stillnot as bad as my dad."

"Oh."

"But that book?" He emphasised the 'that book' phrase.

"What about it? I was shelving and thought it looked good."

"It's fucking beautiful," he said, in a tone that meant it, and leaned against a shelf, tilting his hooded head back.

I stood there in silence, looking at him, waiting for him to give it back.

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” 

He said it with such furor in his eyes that I stopped and just stared at him in more awe at his aura than his face. The way his jaw was slackened like it did a lot of smirking, but at morons, not like he was a dickhead who went around making jokes about girls. The way his hair fell into his eyes, his eyes themselves. They were hazel, I think, but they held such passion, such light, such beauty, such pain. They were eyes that had been kissed goodnight by one too many people and I could not stand it. No, I couldn't fall in love with the boy but I could fall in love with his eyes.

"It's a quote," he said, smiling slightly, this time not in a smirking way. "From the book?"

"Could I have it back?" I said.

"Nope."

"Nope?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"Books like this don't deserve to be read alone. They deserve to be read aloud. Every line of a book or even a speech or graffiti on some bathroom wall at a shitty gas station is a memorable quote, if you think about it. It sticks to you, doesn't it? And some things don't need to be quiet. Art things, anyway."

"You like art?" I said, a intrigued and surprising brightness coming into my voice.

"Yeah," he said. "I can't do visual to save a life, but I play guitar. And write angsty bullshit poems that don't fit together. If that's considered art at all."

"Everything's considered art, if you look at it the right way," I said.

We stood in silence, him still holding the book.

"Are you an artist?" he said, looking at me with those eyes.

"Yeah," I said. "Everyone is, really, but that doesn't matter. I know how to use it, I guess. I write. And I draw. I used to teach it, writing."

"You're a teacher?" he said, his eyes getting bigger.

"Yeah. I mean, I was. Years back."

"You seem a hell of a lot better than any English teacher I ever had."

I shrugged.

"Tell you what," he said, in a deal-making heart-breaking voice. "If you teach me how to write...like, for real, not persuasive essays or topics decided by the county...like, things that matter, things that change people, you know what I mean?"

I nodded. The kid was beautiful.

"I'll give you your book."

***

"The boy, Mister Finn, he's denying that you did it."

"Isn't that good?"

"No," he said, a frown crossing over his face at my newfound 'ignorance.' 

"Why not?"

"It makes you appear as if you and the boy do or did indeed have a relationship. And if you go out in court and he's denying that you did a thing, you're gonna get an fucking lifetime in jail."

"What can I do?"

"You," he said, leaning forward in his chair. "You can lie your ass off."

***

I reached out my hand and tried to take the book from his.

"Nope," he said, his smirky smile playing in. "I'm reading it aloud to you."

***

"All right," I said to the attorney, his fingers doing the spidery dance. "I'll do it."

***

"All right," I said to Frank, his long survivally-painted fingers wrapped around the book tightly. "I'll do it.

 

***

Frank had been embarrassed about his apartment. Most seventeen year olds didn't have their own living area, he realised, but yeah, he had gotten money from working late shifts, and yeah, he hated his family, so he invested in living all-the-way alone. It was a block away from the bookstore, which his father lived above, so it was no struggle convincing his dad, who hated Frank's guts more than Frank hated his. We had decided on Frank's apartment in that going to my hotel room would have been a huge struggle and a huge uproar, not to mention it being overly dripping with awkward. Of course, I didn't say I lived in a hotel room. That would be suspicious enough.

"You like it?" Frank said, shrugging his leather jacket off.

"I feel like you stepped into my seventeen year old mind," I said, in utter awe.

Frank's apartment was quiet, but it looked like it should have been filled with noise. It was decked with posters of musicians and plenty of torn up CD entrails, not just the booklet, the track listing, sometimes even the plastic case too, pinned up with tacks on the painted-over-too-many-times wall. All the walls and all the everything was a sickly eggshell white, except for the window. The window was painted over survival tinged black. 

"Why's the window painted over?" I said innocently.

"It doesn't matter," Frank said, which stung me like I had been slapped.

Why did I feel hurt by some kid I barely knew? 

I shrugged it off and smiled.

"Could I have my book now?"

"Nope," Frank said, with an easy smile that made me feel a bit better.

I groaned dramatically. "Dramatic flit." The cab driver's voice entered into my mind.

"You want me to teach you art, huh?" I said, with a skeptical tone in my voice.

"I want to know how to write."

"No, Frank, that is art. Art changes people. People are art."

"I want to know how to make art," he said, in a more confident voice.

"Of course," I said. "Do you have any tinfoil?"

"Excuse me?" Frank said.

"Tinfoil, like in a roll? Or otherwise."

He raised his eyebrows, giving me the what-the-fuck teenager look that I knew all too well.

"Yes!" I exclaimed, startling him a bit. "I thought you wanted to write!"

"I do, but, what the hell does tinf-"

"I thought you wanted to write!"

He went and got the tinfoil.

"Do you have a paring knife, like for cutting fruit?"

He went to a drawer and pulled one out and handed it to me like I was a murderer.

"What the fuck are you playing at?" he said.

"Art!" I said, and set to work.

Frank sat in silence, sitting intently by my side, Indian style, his big eyes looming over my shoulder at what I was doing.

"What ARE you doing?" he asked, wonder and amazement in his voice.

"Art," I replied, and twisted the knife so that it cut out another flower.

"A...flower?" he said, in that oh-my-god-isn't-that-a-little-GAAAY voice.

"Yes, a flower," I said. "Flowers are nature and nature is art in itself."

He listened intently, leaning into my shoulder and humming slightly. I ended up with five perfect flowers, seven decent flowers, and one shaky flower.

"Frank, what do you see?"

"Art," was his reply.

"More than that."

"Beauty."

"More."

"Skill."

"More!" 

"Imperfection."

"Exactly!" I shouted, causing him to jump back from my shoulder, startled.

I didn't care.

"Art is imperfection!"

"But they're beautiful, I didn't mean-"

"See those five?" I said, splitting my thirteen flowers into three groups of perfect, decent, imperfect.

He nodded, looking at the perfect-ish flowers.

"They're perfect," he said.

"No, they aren't. Crumple them."

"You just spent-"

"Time is nothing, crumple them."

Frank put out a shaky hand and put each flower carefully and gently into it with the other, using his fingers delicately.

"Crumple them."

His fist closed, crushing each one into a ball of foil.

"How did that feel?" I said.

"Art," he said, as if it was an emotion, and it IS!

"We adore the perfect, and yet we can crush them in our fist!" I said, enthusiasm coming into my voice. "The seven decent ones,"

He destroyed those with ease, reaching for the one imperfect flower.

"No!" I said, which caused him to recoil, looking down guiltily. "We reach for the imperfect. Try to crush them. Ruin them. Turn them into something else. Imperfection is art. That is your first lesson. Keep the flower."

I stood up.

"If you'll excuse me."

I left his eggshell white door swinging shut behind me.

 

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I update too goddamn fast, don't I? Feedback is ALWAYS appreciated.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.”   
> ― Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
> 
> Song: Shake It Out by Florence + The Machine

The pitiful thing about being accused of rape is that you get a paper that says, well, you were accused of rape. I mean, I get privacy. I'm not physically required to tell everyone I meet. I can only imagine.

"Hello sir, I went to jail for five years because someone decided I was guilty of anally fucking my best student, paper, not plastic, please!"

And there's no stick-on name tag that reads 'Hello My Name Is RAPIST.' But I do have to register, and that is bad enough.

You know how you can look up a list of the sex offenders in your state or look at a map with their houses marked on there? And you shudder and go "ugh," and stay away from that particular area as a whole? It'll read 'Registered Sex Offender,' their name, degree of crime, and place? Registered Sex Offenders require Registration. That's what I went to do the day after I taught Frank with the flowers. It was hell. The room was gray and smelled like the colour gray itself, filling me with the essence of methane cigarettes and slimy criminals with hooks for hands and candy for children. The way they look at you in disgust, the way you nod and don't smile, it fills you with hate.

'In accordance with New Jersey law, individuals who have been convicted, adjudicated delinquent or found not guilty by reason of insanity for a sex offense must register under New Jersey's Megan's Law.'

I had gotten off easy. First of all, I only got five years in jail. That's better than many. I despised jail, for many reasons, but I could have gotten worse. There's always something worse. Second of all, if I was employed, people could know that I was indeed a sex offender in the state of New Jersey. But I was at a little minimum wage job that didn't even require application or anything. There was still the label, however. Still the way the grimy label sinks into your heart, and marks you without a name tag.

I hated that sinking feeling.

And thus it was the second lesson I was going to teach Frank Iero. Hate.

In order to get together, for art lessons, we had to meet in the dead of night. Frank had school during the day, and ran the register during the night shift, until 3 AM, when he could sneak back to his apartment and have art lessons with me until five or six. This was the plan. I realised he would have no time to sleep, and told him this, to which he replied "Sleep is for the weak." and then laughed, saying he slept in the afternoons between his homework and his shift. Sleeping is useless, to me, really. You can always be up and making things, while sleep drags you down by its claws and forces you to stop for hours at a time.

I was walking to the store, for art and hatred and beauty and Frank, when someone called out the word "Fag!"

I turned around to see a group of teenagers, drinking illegal beer and grinning. 

"That's right, you, faggot!"

I raised my eyebrows in a do-you-want-something?

"Sick fag!" the tallest one yelled, and for a second I thought he knew everything, what I had been accused of, what I did  what had been done to me, all five years flashing in front of my terrified eyes.

It must have been obvious.

"Art fag!" the one next to him called out, and I realised that they were only drunk teenagers.

Sometimes things have layers and sometimes they don't. And it can really scare the shit out of you.

***

The woman who handed me my bag with the things I had bought wore bracelets on her arms and had thin white scars on them. I said nothing. Sometimes you don't want people to say things.

"Thank you," I said, smiling at her.

Sometimes a smile is better than white rooms with therapists, I should know.

She smiled back.

I stepped out of the shop and saw that those teenagers were still there. I didn't care. 

"Fag!" they screamed, and I blew them a goddamned kiss.

Sometimes a kiss is better than screaming, I should know.

The tallest one turned scarlet, rolled his eyes, and walked off stockily. I think he muttered the words "just a fag," but I didn't mind at all. I was going to see Frank.

***

It was dark after I had gotten out of the bookshop and I could barely see Frank himself, just those hazel eyes shining in the darkness. I felt as if I had been in this position, too many times, with the eyes and the dark and all, but that ended in fucking, not art.

Frank unlocked his apartment and flicked on the light, when I said, "No."

"What?" he said.

"Leave it off."

"Why?" he said, shifting uneasily.

I remembered, this was a boy with terribly kissed eyes, and I looked into them.

"It'll make sense. I won't do anything, I swear."

That's the dumb as hell thing to say. The boy probably didn't even suspect me of anything. No one does, til they see your name tag. 

Everyone HAS a name tag, but only some can see the real tag. Everyone else gets your societal tag. Your label. Frank's tag was 'Emo Phase.' Survivally black hair radiates that, if you're a kid. God, he was just a kid. But artists can see other artists, and I could see Frank's eyes. Frank's eyes were his true tag, and they read the word 'Fatalism.' He was a stick of TNT, lit from both ends, and he'd go down with a terrible fight, but one of an artist. I'm an artist myself. I should know. I fight for everything. And Frank was inevitable, but I chose to ignore it. 

Frank flipped the light switch.

"Okay."

It was pitch black in the apartment, and the painted-over window added to the inky suffocation of shadows. In the dark with someone, your souls blend together. I could feel Frank Iero's heart itself, beating nonstop in the tarry air.

"Okay, pick a colour," I said, quietly opening the paper bag I had gotten from the art store and uncapping the bottles of paint.

"How can I pick a colour if I can't see them?"

"Can you see me?" 

"No."

"Well, then why did you pick me of all people?"

He picked up a bottle of paint, guided into his hand by my own.

"What colour's your floor, Frank?" I asked.

"White."

"No, it's not."

"Yeah, it is."

"Look at it, what colour is it?"

"Black."

"Look at the paint, what colour is it?"

"Black."

"What colour is the floor when you can see it?"

"White. No, eggshell white, gross white. It makes me sick, I fucking hate it!"

"What colour is the paint when you can see it?"

"It doesn't matter!"

His voice rang out, clear as a bell.

"Exactly!"

I could hear him smile.

"You said you hate the floor."

"Yes."

"Destroy it!"

"How?"

"Make it beautiful."

There was only the sound of the smear of paint and the steady breathing and beating of Frank's breath and his heart.

He reached towards me for the second bottle of paint and I pushed all of them towards his hands.

A fleck of paint landed in my hair.

"Do you like the floor?" Frank said, his hands still smearing it with unseen colour.

"Hate it," I said, and he pushed me a bottle of paint.

We sat there for an hour or so, smearing and destroying and making and I was wrong.

THIS was the making of love, not some sideways fuck in a dark hotel.

Love was art, we were making it, THIS was intimacy. And what a wonderful caricature.

The bottles of paint emptied.

"Turn on the light," I said.

It was gorgeous. Scarlet reds and deep blues and mysterious greens all colliding in a collage of destroya.

"How?" said Frank.

His kissed eyes were shining now, flecks of scarlet in his hair, the colour of angry blood and hate and passion. 

"Art," I said. "And I'll expect my book.

 

 

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update is a bit short but it holds a message. Feedback is always welcome.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And down will come baby, cradle and all...

When I was a kid, I had big eyes and no voice. Other kids could try to talk to me, smile at me, look at my art, and I'd shut them out. Shutting things out is a part of me. I close things up, close them off, get told to close my mouth and do so. I did it from fear and I did it from mercy. Mercy is important.

They didn't really want to look at my art, did they? They wanted to get inside of my soul. And I didn't want to let anyone in.

When I was seventeen, Frank's age, I was always standing outside of liquor stores with kids like me, barely speaking or looking upon each other. "Will you buy us beer?" became a common song playing in my head. Other music was not beauty, it was meant to shut things out, meant to make ears bleed so that hearts didn't. We were broken, but our wounds were closed.

When I became a teacher, I hated it. You couldn't get close to kids. As friends, I mean. Fuck, it always sounds like you're trying to be a perv when you're interested in kids. But kids are innocence. You can capture it on a page, in a lullaby, in a smile. Look at a goddamned kid swinging on a swing at the playground or blowing goddamned bubbles, tell me that's not innocence. Capture that moment in one of them shining bubbles, capture my eyes, capture my mind. Tell me what I have in mind right then is taking and abusing and fucking that kid because I'm not.

I didn't rape Andrew Lee Roth Finn. No one believes me. Since I would be marked as a liar I was forced to become one.

He wasn't at the trial himself. He was too afraid, hell, he was a fucking kid. 

They asked me I indeed sexually assaulted him. 

And I said yes.

***

"Lullabies," I said, dreamily.

"Yeah?" said Frank.

It was 4:30 AM, around an hour after the painting of the floor, and we were sitting in the center of the destroyed floor, the beauty, the passion, the sex, Frank's arms wrapped around his legs in a tight embrace, me talking while he nodded. After the moment was broken, I had asked Frank to read me the book. He said no, shaking his head and smiling at the floor, this time not his battered shoes but at his Art. 

I had noticed he never took off his shoes. I supposed it was a form of shutting me out, or he thought I was a perv. 

To be fair, everyone else thought I was.

"I'll tell you later," I said, meaning the lullabies. "I want to read the book."

Frank stood up, setting off impulses that jumped to cracks in the coat of paint that bound us. It was branded on our skin like a mark of a Warrior or something like that. He went to the eggshell white table, where the book lay carelessly. It looked as if it had been opened. It probably had. Frank picked it up. A brush of cracked blue dust spread over the table and lay there, tainting the colour meant for destroying. Art was a now our arsenal, and our choice of weapon was paint. 

"It's fucking beautiful," he said, with the same expression that he had that first night, and opened it to page one.

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth," he began.

He said it with such passion in his voice, such fire in his eyes. Art is like fire, it spreads quickly if it's hot stuff, but it can bite you. 

Art is like sex, too. Making art is like making love, however petty the term is. It's passionate. It takes your mind and body and soul. And if you do it right, it leaves you breathless.

"In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father."

Frank swallowed hard at that bit, but kept reading, with the fire dimmed a bit. 

"They're nice and all-I'm not saying that-but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D. B. About, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks."

Frank paused and glanced up at me. I didn't realise I was smiling so wide by just watching him read, but he met my eyes tentatively and smiled slightly.

"He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was 'The Secret Goldfish.' It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me."

That one detail practically killed me, too. Some kid, shielding himself from the world through some goddamned goldfish. You'd say he was selfish, but I'd call him scared. That's the thing about most people. They look tough on the outside, maybe even terrible, but they're honestly scared shitless.

Frank cleared his throat.

"Now he's out in Hollywood, D. B. , being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me."

Frank smiled a bit at that one, and I nodded for him to keep going. I was smiling all the while and I had no idea why.

"Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep. Pencey Prep is this school that's in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. You probably heard of it. You've probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse's picture, it always says: 'Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.' Strictly for the birds. They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way."

Frank closed the book, the fire still burning in his eyes. I could taste the tension in the air.

"You're right," I said, after a while. "Books are meant to be read aloud."

I tried not to tell myself that I used to read Shakespeare with Andrew.

***

It ended with Frank awkwardly saying that he needed to head to school soon, and me leaving, because I knew he meant he needed to shower the paint off, he just didn't want to say it to a man who he met at a bookstore merely two days ago. 

I didn't care about the paint that stained my body. Humans are allowed to be art. Art is being free, and that is all I wanted for five years. My hands were stained blue, no, sapphire, and my wrists and shoes red, no, scarlet, ironically. Metaphorically burned at the crucifix, a modern day witch hunt had happened that day, no, those years. But my face was flecked with green, like the spatters I saw in Frank's hazel and shadow-kissed eyes. My face was flecked with youth, no, I was wrong, Frank is no youth. Frank is a shadow with light attached at the end instead of an object, Frank is a shaky pencil line in the heart monitor that he writes himself, Frank is no child, Frank is Frank. That's all.

It was about five o'clock in the morning and I was wandering in the streets, covered in paint and looking drunk. I was, in a way. So was Frank. We were drunken on art. Drunken on each other. But I was no child and he was no man and it had been two days and it was only art! But there is no such thing as something being only...

I walked into the coffee shop to buy my coffee like I liked it, too damn weakened down with sweetness. 

"Name?" the woman asked.

"Gerard," I said, and went to stand at the counter; I never sat down.

"Gerard?" said a familiar voice.

Shit.

 

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I shouldn't be updating this fast...as always, comments are awesome.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "this led to a full scale investigation  
> and I was removed from the house for three days  
> until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises"
> 
> From To This Day, a poem by Shane Koyczan.

The voice belonged to Andrew Lee Roth Finn, alleged "rapee."

"Come to accuse me of anything?" I said, bitterness in my voice.

I could feel the anger welling up inside me already. This was the very kid who RUINED my life. This was the very kid who put me in jail for FIVE GODDAMNED YEARS.

"Gerard, I'm twenty-one. I'm not some sixteen year old kid writing in a fantasy world anymore."

"Yeah? Well, I'm thirty-two," I spat. "I'm not some teacher who'll pick good, bright pets to stay after school and read Shakespeare and write fan fiction. What are you, a bloody fangirl?"

I hadn't ever gotten the chance to even speak to Andrew since the Friday afternoon and I was mad as hell.

"I'm thirty-fucking-two," I said, my voice raising. People were looking at us. I lowered my voice slightly, hissing in his face with even more fury. "Thirty fucking two, Andrew, and because of you. I could be working as an artist, a writer, hell, I even wanted to start a band at one point. But people think I'm some kind of...thing! Some kind of freak that does art and fucks kids in the ass and smiles about it! I did NOTHING, Andrew, and I lied for your ass and to save mine. But you know what? I DIDN'T GET TO SAVE MY GODDAMNED ASS BECAUSE YOU WERE TOO BUSY TRYING GET YOUR SHRIMPY LITTLE ASS OUT OF IT."

"Excuse me, sir," the woman at the coffee counter said, looking at me sternly. "But you're going to need to leave."

My coffee cup was sitting on the counter itself, 'Gerard' written on it. It might've just as well read 'RAPIST.' It sat there as a dare and I took it. I walked forward, bumping into Andrew's shoulder on my way out. I decided I didn't want the coffee after all, with the sickeningly sweet rush already in my blood and in my throat. I took a wild gulp anyway and tossed the rest of the cup into the trash can.

"Thank you," I said. "For the coffee."

***

It was my shift at the bookstore and I was late. No one noticed it anyways; it was raining hard and slow that day, giving the world a sluggish unappealing glare. The streets were full of black umbrellas but I held none, giving the barren streets a splash of bright colour as I walked, stared at by many, whispered about by more, and spoken to by none. That's how it works when you're an artist, sometimes, but it's exactly how it works when you're the work of art yourself.

"You a goddamn customer?" said Billy, lounging behind the front table.

"No," I said.

"Then you have a time to get here and a place to be at that time. And that place is here!"

I didn't understand what he had said at all but I nodded and walked to the back to begin sorting books.

"No, you work the register."

"Okay."

Working registers was something I was used to. I never had really amounted to much at all, and people were always looking for help at Target or Publix or Walmart or CVS. CVS had been the best, or I guess, worst, when I was addicted to all and any sorts of pills. When I was caught opening a bottle of sleeping pills and looking about ready to down them all with a bottle of Vodka, the owner of the store gently took them out of my hand and told me to get therapy, scribbled a number for a suicide hotline on my arm in Sharpie, and left me out in the cold. It was raining, I remember, and I spent an hour vomiting up shitty beer behind a garbage can. The last thing I knew was that I went to a metal concert, and the last thing I remember was waking up in a sweaty bed alone. 

But working registers opens a window into people's souls. It sounds dumb as hell, but you can see what people are buying and look at their name tag, and know exactly what kind of a person you are.

Before long I had a cluster of teenage girls whispering about how sexy I was in a corner until I loudly said that I was thirty-two and please leave if you aren't going to buy anything. One brunette chick in the group who hadn't been whispering put down one of the paranormal romance novels that I thought looked like utter crap on the counter and the rest left, still giggling.

There was a punk rock girl who bought a fantasy book about fairies and a high school jock who bought a book on gay marriage politics and a blonde girl in a cheerleader costume who bought a book on Satanism. Name tags don't matter when you're reading. You can be whatever you like. 

Frank came in in a rush, spilling water from a bright red umbrella onto the freshly vacuumed carpet and causing the bell to ring loudly. He was mad at something, I could tell, but I didn't know what it was. I turned to the man in front of me, who was buying a book on rape culture in New Jersey and I held my breath, carefully scanning it and not looking up.

"Paper or plastic?" I asked, not smiling.

"Plastic," said the rough voice, with a bit of a moronic rude smirk in it.

I slid the tainted book into a plastic bag that advertised a simplistic logo that I didn't recognise and handed it over.

"That'll be thirteen-ninety-nine," I said, my voice feeling heavy in my mouth.

The guy slid his gloved hand onto the counter and put down a ten dollar bill and a five dollar bill.

"Keep the change, freak," he said, spitting phlegm onto the counter.

I looked up immediately to see who the hell it was, but they had already turned back, leaving the book on the counter. The figure opened a black umbrella not unlike Frank's red oneand headed out into the thickly pouring rain, which was battering against the sidewalk like the thoughts battering against my mind.

Who else in this town knew what I was accused of? And what was the price of it not getting out?

But the biggest question in my mind was...Did Frank see anything?

But he was only sitting there at one of the wooden tables, a pitiful scowl on his face, scribbling with a pen on a sheet of damp notebook paper.

***

I entered Frank's apartment late that night, at 3:30. He answered the door after three minutes of knocking, with bleary eyes, as if he had been asleep.

He really hadn't been sleeping.

"I can leave if you like," I said, turning away from his still-present scowl.

"No, that's okay," he said. "Stay. Please."

The "please" was what got to me. It was so urgent, so lonely. Frank wasn't some poser, he really did need to survive, and he had no one to get through it with.

I smiled artificially and entered his apartment. The swirling collage was still present at the center of his floor, sticking out as something different in his drab apartment. Maybe I was the something different in his drab life. 

He was looking at me expectantly, as of he was waiting for me to request parchment paper or pull out a gallon of glitter glue and start an arts and crafts project.

"Are we going to...art?" he asked, his mouth turning up at one corner.

I chuckled.

"I thought you wanted to write."

"You said that writing is art," he retorted hotly.

"So it is. Make art, then. Write me something."

"Now?"

"Why the hell not?"

He glared at his shoes and then headed to his school bag, pulling out a notebook and a nice ballpoint pen and then collapsing into a chair, tucking up his knees and hugging them like he did on the other night. I was going to ask him why he sat like that when he opened his mouth and asked a question first.

"What do you want me to write about?"

"Writing writes itself," I said. "Writing will be what it wants to be written about."

He nodded like he understood and then began writing like mad, words spilling out of his mind and onto the paper, like the rain hitting the window and sticking there. Thoughts were visibly sticking in Frank's head and it was difficult for him to transfer them all to the paper. He stopped writing so fast after about five minutes and crossed out a few words, rewriting the whole thing on a new sheet and passing the book to me.

"No," I said, the words sticking to the roof of my mouth. "Read it aloud."

Frank looked around nervously at the crowd that was not there, and began, starting off slowly and speeding up.

"When you're a kid, slogans jump out at you.  
Ones on TV, mostly, that box that fills your mind with nothing but the smaller picture.  
Because you can't handle the bigger picture   
If it won't fit inside your skull.  
And slogans like Asshole! Fag! Egocentric dick! stick in your mind more than jingles  
Turning your life into a shitty laugh track    
That laughs at all the wrong things.  
When you're a kid, you're torn apart.  
You just don't know it yet."

It was pretty good. Dislodged a bit. Torn apart. Shreds of something beautiful taped together. But I couldn't let him know that.

"You need to work on structure," I said, feeling like the pretentious douche English teacher I was.

Frank's gorgeously kissed eyes fell.

"I liked it," I tried.

But nothing gave into that sorrowful fallen gaze.

"It's okay," said Frank, but he didn't mean it.

For the rest of the time we had, he read me more of the beautiful book, but I wasn't paying attention to that. I was paying attention to the way his eyes looked.

They looked as if they could know the second on the clock of the apocalypse when the world would break and the moment at which the sky could bend.

If his writing wasn't art yet, at least his eyes were.

 

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A disclaimer for what I've done so far: I don't own Gerard Way, I wish I owned Frank Iero, and The Catcher in the Rye is not mine.
> 
> If you catch the Umbrella Academy reference in this I love you.
> 
> As always, comments are loved.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Song: You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison
> 
> "That’s a funny thing to promise. If nothing ever happens to him, then nothing will ever happen to him." -- Finding Nemo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The notes for this chapter are a WARNING SO PLEASE READ.
> 
> This chapter includes a scene in which Gerard is raped. You can skip over the scene or the entire chapter if you prefer, or you can choose to not read this fic.

Frank Iero had tragic eyes and a tragic soul to match, I learned. Almost anything Frank tried to write or do turned out with the gray peeking through over the light or the shadow sneaking in around the beautiful words he tried to create. Art couldn't be itself if you couldn't let it, and Frank was too scared to let go of himself and let his words speak themselves.

"Gerard?" he said, shyly.

"Yeah?" I said, turning to face him.

We had just read an especially intriguing part of The Catcher in the Rye and were basking in its glory.

"That man who came in a couple days ago."

"Yes?" I said, trying to hide the fact that my heart was racing like mad. Did he know?

"Did you know him?"

"No."

"Good."

"Who was it?" 

"No one."

"Frank, who?"

"The mayor's son. He's a bitch, don't pay attention to him. He comes into the bookstore all the time, messes with your head."

The mayor's son. The mayor's FUCKING son, of all people, knew my secret. I could be facing another trial, I could be facing getting heckled out of the town, I could be facing....Frank. No, he couldn't know. He wouldn't know. 

"Oh," I said, casually. "Right."

"Do you want something to drink?" Frank said.

That was weird. Frank never asked me about something as casual as that before. We had actually never eaten or drank in his apartment at all, I had just figured he ate on his own time or with someone else. Then I realised...who would be his someone else besides me? 

"Okay," I said, standing.

We always sat in the center of the floor, in the center of the destroyed beauty. It was meant for art, that was all.

Frank opened his refrigerator, and what did I tell you, it was practically empty. 

"I have Coke," he said, guiltily, as if he shouldn't have asked me anything at all.

"Do you want to go get coffee instead?"

I gasped in the back of my throat. How could I have said that? Frank was a fucking kid, and with at least a few people knowing what I had done in this town, not to mention Andrew being here, it was going to look really bad.

But Frank already had the tease of a smile on his face, and you didn't see that often.

"Okay," he said, and we headed to his door simultaneously.

However wrong it looked, it didn't feel wrong at all.

***

Getting to a coffee place in New Jersey would either require a cab or a walk, and even though a cab looked more suspicious, a walk would get more glances and it would take longer. I opted for a cab, sliding into it with Frank all the way on one side and I all the way on the other, which didn't get much of sideways glare at all, thankfully.

I decided ultimately that it had been quite a bad and rather disturbing idea to have a coffee with a seventeen year old but there was no backing out, now, and we were already there.

The glassy door swung open and the coffee shop was almost empty, thankfully. A girl with bright red hair sat behind the counter, listening to music way too loud.

"Excuse me," I said. 

She looked up casually and took out a headphone.

"What would you like...at four in the god damn morning?" 

The end of her sentence was sharper than a razor blade.

"Two-caramel-macchiatos-no-whipped-cream-keep-the-change-motherfucker," Frank said fast as fuck in the same cutting-edge-bitch-ass voice and put down a ten dollar bill.

"Names?" said the girl, even though there were only two other people there at all.

"Batman and fucking Robin," said Frank in the same sarcastic voice.

The girl gave a smirky laugh, revealing a glint of a tongue ring, and started making the order.

I glanced around the shop to see familiar checkered tables and booths and skimpy tall tables with high stools to match. Places like this are a stereotypical joke in my life, all the same, never flickering. They didn't even have coffee at Buckner...

***

"Hey, asshole!"

I turned to see a tall guy with an eyebrow ring and a shadow of a beard. 

"You're a teacher, huh?"

I nodded. Best to keep it silent, I figured. Silence feels loud, but it's certainly not. People don't notice you when you're silent. But this guy definitely did.

"You gonna teach us a god damn lesson?"

"N-no," I said.

He was closer now. I could smell the nicotine on his breath. His thick palm pushed me into the wall and he leaned into my face like he was either going to kiss my nose or deliver a death threat. Me being the total sarcastic ass that I was, I made a kissy face, sealing my fate eternally as the gay asshole I eventually was known to be.

He reeled back, wincing.

"Fucking fag," he spat, and turned around before looking back. "Watch your god damn back, buddy. One of 'em'll get ya, before long, ya know."

Hell, I knew.

***

"Batman and fucking Robin, two caramel macchiatos," the red-hair-dye chick said in a too-loud voice.

Frank stood up to get the coffee, and only then did I realise he had paid for it, making it feel even more awkward.

I sipped my coffee casually.

"So, when did you get a voice?" I said, raising my eyebrows at Frank. 

"You have to be an asshole to survive," Frank said, answering the question he knew I meant to ask.

"That's true, sometimes, I guess. But people think you're more of an asshole if you try to fight back with love."

"That's the thing," Frank said. "We don't think actual assholes are assholes, we truly envy them. When we say assholes, we mean guts. Try to fuck up that system with theories of love, it'll collapse on you and you become the gayass snarky bitch with a mouth too big for his mind."

God. He wasn't too poetic with all the cursing in the way, but he was art within himself.

I nodded.

"But define love."

***

"Hey, English."

That was what they called me, mostly.

"What you doing?"

"Nothing," I mumbled.

"What this word mean?"

I lifted my head, looking at the questioner in mind.

"What's the word?"

"Friv-luss," said the man, shifting.

"Frivolous?" I said, pronouncing it perfectly.

"Goddamn English," muttered a second guy, but the asker nodded.

"Frivolous, not having any serious purpose or value whatsoever."

"What?"

"Shit that nobody really needs or wants," I said. "Your mom's frivolous."

The second guy snorted and the first kinda grinned.

"Thanks," he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. "Watch your back, kid."

***

"Doesn't matter," said Frank. "Love is bullshit."

***

Before long I was getting timid questions from quite a lot of guys, asking for definitions, trying to get educated so they could handle the world when they got out. Not all of them did. I saw three guys commit suicide in my five years at Buckner. And all for the same reason.

"They say you can define anything, huh?" said Tiny. 

All these guys had nicknames that stuck easily, there was a large variety too: Nemo, Tiny, Needles, Kiss, Eyebrow, and me, English. I don't think any of them actually figured out my real name. 

So, anyway, Tiny was in no way Tiny. Tiny was practically gigantic. And all of us were terrified of him, even the guy who had approached me on my first week. But Tiny was different. Tiny was the reason they told me to watch my god damn back. I should've been listening.

Right, so I was in my first year, about six months in, and gaining a reputation as the bitching teacher, when Tiny came up to me and said those words.

"Not, well, anything, I guess, I mean-"

"You better be able to."

I looked up at Tiny noncommittally.

"Did I fucking stutter?" he said. "Know this word, English? Besmirch."

"To make something...dirty."

"Hell yeah fucking right," said Tiny.

"We got a deal, English? Now, or later?"

"I won't trip up."

"Oh, but you will," and he smirked before lumbering away from my shocked face.

I was in deep fucking shit.

***

"Love isn't bullshit if it's real," I said right back.

"You see, that's the trouble," Frank said, with far-off eyes. "It never is."

***

I got a dictionary from the prison activity center. It was one of those "you'll be all right and dandy, pal" prisons, except none of us would be.

"What're you in for?" asked Needles, biting his lip.

He was called Needles because he had a phobia of Needles. I guessed the guys thought he'd jump or something every time they even said the word, but he didn't.

"Accused sexual assault," I said, breathing in sharply.

"Aw, man, of a student?"

I nodded, still memorising words. Indicate. Infertility. Infidelity. 

"Was she hot?"

I bit my lip. He took this as a yes.

"Did ya do it?"

"No."

My voice came out bigger and angrier than I wanted it to.

"Whoa, there, English. Don't get fucked over it."

"What about you?" I said.

"Drug possession," Needles said. "Heroin."

"No offense, but don't you got a fear of-"

"Snort it," he said, wiping his nose.

"Oh," I said, not even knowing that it was in fact possible to snort heroin.

"Whatcha doin?" he asked, looking at my dictionary. "Whatchu readin a dictionary fo? You know all dem words."

"Nah," I said. "Tiny don't think so."

"Aw, shit, man. Watch your back."

And then Needles got up and left, probably to go find Nemo.

Ha. Ha.

I kept staring at words, but none of them would seep into my mind like I wanted them to.

***

"Hey, whatcha doin hanging out with a seventeen year old kid?"

***

Each day Tiny had asked me a word and I had answered accordingly, correctly, and with a hint of sarcasm. They were words meant to trip me up, synonyms for rape or assault or gay or something fucked up entirely. 

"Hey, English, I got you a word."

"What is it?" I asked, keeping it cool.

There would always be the chance that I wouldn't know it.

"Insinuate."

I knew this one...didn't I? My heart was fucking pounding like it always did. I swallowed.

"To kill."

"Wrong."

What? 

"Insinuate. Three definitions. To suggest or hint at something bad in an unpleasant way. To maneuver oneself into a favourable position by means of manipulations. Or." He paused for effect. "To slide oneself slowly and smoothly into position. But we know that's not exact..."

My head was spinning all over the place.

"It's a deal, English," said Tiny, smirking a bit. "See you tomorrow night."

He blew me a kiss.

That was my thing. 

***

"No, sir, he's my-"

Frank was at a loss for words. The man standing before us was looking upon us as if we were an abomination to the human race.

"He's my-"

"I'm his uncle," I said.

Frank sipped his coffee.

"Yeah."

***

When you lay down face flat on concrete your hipbones grind into the floor in pure pain, but I knew that would seem like nothing compared to the events that would take place. I had gotten goodbye wishes, sorry glances, smirks, giggles, whispers, but nothing would stop my fate. I had lit the TNT from the beginning and it was about to explode.

Tick....tick.....tick....

I realised it was not a clock, it was a zipper being pulled down slowly, the teeth grinding like the teeth that ground into my stomach.

Tick...tick........tick...........click!

"Faggot," was all I heard, and the rest was the tearing at my waist and the heavy breaths of pure pain I fought back and the grunts and the whispers of those hearing and doing nothing and the tears, slick on my face.

When he was finished he stood up, ticked his zipper back into place, and walked away. I waited until I couldn't hear his footsteps anymore and pulled my pants back up and edged away, cringing. There was blood, but it didn't matter. I couldn't even stand. 

This was what they thought I did to Andrew, I realised. And my stomach felt sick.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You and I are such similar creatures, Vivian. We both screw people for money." - Pretty Woman.

Coffee shops fill with unwanted people faster than hearts fill with unwanted feelings. Old people, young people, college students, high school students, rich white girls, single moms, screaming babies, caffeine addicted lost souls, swirling around a poor girl who can barely keep up with her scattered thoughts much less the scattered orders. And staring. Mainly at me.

I sipped my coffee awkwardly, focusing mainly on the teenage girl who was staring at Frank like he was God for wearing a shirt with the name of a punk band on it. She had big eyes that were thickly coated with eyeliner and sharpie quotes up and down her arms and a ring in her lip like Frank…oh, fuck, he did have a lip ring…and the shaggy past-dyed hair of a girl who had outgrown her scene phase not too long ago and wasn’t ready to move on either. And she was looking at Frank like she knew him, and then she looked up at me with a glare in her eyes and nodded slightly. I subtely nodded back, more of an acknowledgement than a response. Frank noticed, and he spoke.

“Who was that?” he said.

“No one,” I said.

It very well could’ve been. 

“Let’s go,” Frank mumbled, and heads turned as Frank swung his feet that didn’t even brush the grimy floor over the edge of his chair and part through the Red Sea of judgemental whispers, meeting every glarer right in the eyes and nodding back at me.

“Yes, we fuck hourly,” Frank said, to the nearest spectator as the door swung open and we left the restaurant.

“We fuck hourly?” I said. “We fuck…I’m not even gonna ask. Frank, you can’t just go around saying shit like that, especially when-“

“Especially when what?”

“Nothing!”

“Especially when wh-“

“You should get to school.”

“Bye.”

Frank stomped off with a hint of anger and regret in his step, shaking his head.

That’s when I realised it was a Saturday.

And Frank didn’t want to see me.

Without the enclosure of an apartment or a hideout or art, we were not timeless. We were limited, surrounded by eyes like daggers and words that flew at us pell-mell like arrows ready to pierce one of our heels and then we would fall. But I was only his…there was no word… Artist was too sexual, we weren’t romantic, we were too awkward to be friends, but we knew each other better than anyone…what were we? In the apartment, it didn’t matter…

A hand touched me on the shoulder. I whirled around to see Andrew Lee Roth standing in front of me, smirk askew, eyes downcast.

“Gerard…” he said, in a sighing tone, one that made me feel like he was the teacher and I was the troubled kid. “What are you doing?”

“I…I don’t know,” I said, and stumbled dazily off to find somewhere I could drink myself into a stupor without a second glance.

***

If a band is playing at a New Jersey bar at 6 am you know it’s going to be a shitty one. It was called Where’s The Fucking Exit?!! and had gone through several name transformations, including Fuck The Man, Fuck The Whole Gay World, and Where Are My Fucking Pills? before deciding on the totally pathetic name that they now had (not that the others were much better). And it was a queercore band. But it was playing as background music to my binge drinking and it described it quite well too.

“FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK THE MAN. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK MY LIFE. HEY, ALL Y’ALL GO TO HELL CAUSE THAT’S WHERE I’M STAYING. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK THE MAN. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK ME, MAN.”

The lead singer was a shrimpy kid about nineteen and had a terrible voice, squeaking in all the wrong places, and he couldn’t scream half-well either. 

“F-F FUCK THE MAN. FFFUCK.”

His voice was slowly giving out, I could tell.

“T-THANK YOU FOR COMIGN OUT HERE.”

There were two people in the bar.

“WE’RE RELEASING AN ALBUM IN NOVEMBER.”

Hoo-fuckin-ray.

“Hey, you,” said the kid, sitting down next to me.

“Yeah,” I said, paying more attention to the bottom of my glass than to the boy.

“What’s your name.”

“Geaaraed.”

I was more drunk than I thought, my voice was sliding everywhere.

“What’s yours?”

“Whatever you want it to be for an hour.”

Jesus fucking Christ, this kid was a prostitute.

“How old are you?” I said, sounding more incredulous than sincere.

“Twenty-three.”

His phone started ringing. The ringtone was a Ramones song.

“Shit, I gotta go.”

He dropped a card on the table.

“Call me.”

Fuck, he was barely out of childhood and already screwed up. He reminded me of that crappy Julia Roberts movie about the hooker…Pretty Woman, but no Cinderella story and no falling in love.

People make me sad as hell when I’m drunk.

I put the card in my pocket.

***

I was shelving books this time, A-B-C-order-by-category-not-Dewey, and I was drunk but still slightly aware of my surroundings.

“Does D come before P?” I muttered to myself, books slipping through my hands like butter.

Words were sliding over my tongue and it tickled my throat.

“The Joys Of Gay Sex,” I read aloud, and giggled, putting it in the Christian books section, next to a book titled Homosexuality: Blasphemy To Our Earth.

“Blasphemy,” I giggled, picking up the next set of books, ten copies of Black Beauty.

The card was still heavy in my pocket.

“Hey, hey, I fucking read this book as a kid, it’s about ponies!”

The store was empty. It was only open in the mornings on weekends and it was dark as Satan, and Frank was nowhere to be found. I had headed to a liquor store after leaving the bar and gotten to my shift on time, surprisingly. 

“Frank?” I called, my voice shivering. “Frank, where are you? Be-be okay, Frank, you’re a good kid, I promise, don’t end up like that hooker in the bar, s-someone’ll love you, I promise.”

I felt my hands go limp and drop the armful of books.

“I promise.”

It was black.

***

“Gerard, wake up,” a voice was saying.

It was my mom’s voice…n-no, it was too little it was Frank’s voice. Frank was ALIVE! Frank was okay!

I sat up and hugged Frank.

“You’re not dead!” I slurred.

“It’s three fucking AM, Gerard, how long have you been out? And-and, you’re covered in vomit, so if you could not…thanks, and you’re drunk, and you should get home.”

“I d-don’t-dunno…Frank, your mouth is shiny…”

Frank swallowed hard at this.

“F-F-Frank, are you a hooker?”

I giggled.

“There was this kid hooker at the bar and he kept singing FUCKFUCKFUCCK and he gave me this pretty card, you wanna see, it’s not like a birthday card it’s like a business card and it has a number on it, see, and he said call me…Frank, are you a hooker?”

“Gerard, you’re drunk.”

“Ye-yeah, that happens. Sometimes.”

“You should get cleaned up, you threw up on yourself, and you should get some sleep. Do you have a house or something?”

“I..I don’t think so?”

“Here, stand up.”

Frank draped one of my arms over his shoulders and pulled me up to stand. It felt shaky but I could walk, probably.

“I’m taking you upstairs, okay?”

We started walking in an awkward tangle to Frank’s apartment, which felt like forever away. My legs wobbled a bit, and when we got there I collapsed in front of the door while Frank was unlocking it.

“Find something to wear, kay?”

Frank obviously wasn’t going to help me change, so I went into his room and looked around for where one might find clothes. He had posters on his wall and action figures in a cardboard box and comic books on his dresser and it took me a while before it occurred to me to check his closet. I picked out a red shirt without really looking at it and pulled off my own. A book fell out. 

“The Joys Of Gay Sex,” I muttered, and stowed it into Frank’s dresser

Then I squeezed into the red shirt before putting my dirty shirt in an empty black laundry bin and walking out of the closet.

“Hey, Frank, I came out of the closet,” I said.

“Ha-ha,” he said, faking laughter and glancing at my shirt. “Nice choice.”

He said it kind of ironically. I glanced down at the shirt wildly and saw that it read ‘Homophobia is gay.’

“Did you make this?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You gonna sleep, or?”

“I guess…”

“Well, you can have this chair or my bed, I guess…”

“Chair,” I said, because I was too tired to even care.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,’ I said. “I’m fucking tired.”

“Okay,” he said, tossing me an ugly green blanket and moving into his bedroom. “Good night, I guess.”

“Night…Frank?”

“You sure you’re not a hooker?”

“Pretty sure,” Frank replied, with a smile in his voice, and shut the door too loudly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so long since the last update. Comments are appreciated.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Song of the chapter: Poison & Wine by The Civil Wars

Waking up with a hangover on a Sunday morning is one of the worst feelings in the world. Not just the headache and heartbreak of it all, but the fact that everyone around you is bustling off to church, all holy and whatnot, praising God and telling all the drunkards and homosexuals to go to hell. If either of those are true, I got two points on the checklist of eternal damnation. Almost makes you wanna drink again.

Frank Iero was awake and with undetermined religion, which gave me another problem: where the hell was I supposed to go with him still here? I guessed it would be hard to give an unplanned art lesson when I was hung over and all, but it was basically my only option. Worse, Frank was in the shower, making me feel even more uncomfortable in the current situation. 

I sat up and pulled the hideous blanket off, coughing and glancing around at the torn up walls of Frank’s apartment. It was 9:00, a Batman clock that sat on a table read, the time when everyone would be getting to church, and all.

***

Frank exited the bathroom already dressed in a rather informal outfit. I was noticing him noticing me stare out through the thin cracks in his sinfully painted over window into the bustle of suits and umbrellas and bibles clutched between delicate virgin fingers. 

“I’m an atheist,” he said, more to the people outside than to me. “but I believe in hell.”

“I’m an atheist,” I said, more to him. “but I believe in saviours.”

“Do you wanna read that book?” Frank said, abruptly changing his tone, but I could tell his voice was choked.

“It is the reason I’m here,” I said.

I immediately regretted the words exiting my mouth as they hit Frank Iero’s like a slap in the face.

“Initially, I mean.”

He nodded slowly and opened the book to the spot he had left dog-eared and forlorn.

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different.”

He cleared his throat and touched his eye lid gingerly as if wiping away a single teardrop, then replacing it by the book, as if to say: “New Jersey kids don’t cry.” But they could.

“The only thing that would be different would be you. N-not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger.”

His voice cracked just the slightest bit.

“Or…or…you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them.”

And then I noticed it. Frank was an artist when he broke. Not that he did break, so to say…damn, it was hard to explain. It was the look in his tragically kissed eyes that cracked like glass with tears or pain or whatever the hell he was full of, and how his chapped lips parted and how his expression faltered. Beauty was art, and Frank…Frank was fucking beautiful.

“I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.”

“You-“

No, I couldn’t say anything. He’d call his father or the police or someone or…damn it! What the hell was the big fuss with being beautiful anyway? Girls could do it, girls could call each other beautiful or say they wish they had those gorgeous blue eyes or those thin thighs…but this was different. I was the guy driving that car in that black and white commercial. ‘This man has a disease no one can see. This man is a homosexual.’ I was the guy who everyone stared at in the park when I was writing something on a bench or drawing an innocent fucking picture. I was the smiling guy handing out pink and white striped bags stuffed to the brim with candy and sexual assault. And they all saw me like that, with glasses called legality and hearts called pity and eyes who only looked upon the child, because they really do listen to kids, they really do!

“You-“

No, I would not say something. Words drag you down, I could barely speak, barely breath. I was the victim in this world of court cases that reside on the writing skills of a child, I was the fucked, not the fucked up, I was the broken, not the breaker, but he was both, and why couldn’t I call him beautiful? He would laugh, shoot me down with the arrows they call righteousness and disturbance and bigotry, but this was not bigotry, this was art. Or are they the same…

“You-“

“Are you all right?”

No, I wasn’t. My head was spinning with a hangover and the thoughts of doing things, I must still be half drunk or double drunk or high on confusion. It was hot and cold and dark and blindingly white and I was shaking and stirring and fuck, art!

Beuaty can be art. Beauty can be art. Beauty can be art. People are art. 

Art doesn’t get you put in jail.

“Are you sure you’re okay? Do you need a drink or something?”

That was either the last or the first thing I needed, a drink. What, did he have a gin and tonic waiting for me in his eggshell white fridge, the kid? It was Sunday, day of rest, and I was feeling unrested.

He came out with a can of Diet Coke in hand and an apologetic smile on his lips. I drank it, feeling young and old, the chill filling my face and emptying my flushed cheeks of distress and overbearing terror and then I heard it.

There was a voice in my head, a clear one, despite the daggers of pain and strife and poison and wine digging into my skull otherwise. And it was beautiful.

What it said was between me and the voice.

And suddenly, I was fragile. Ready to break, ready to fall. If I moved I was fatally bound to crashing and burning. Sometimes things have to break. Still, sometimes they don’t want to. 

Fuck, fuck, oh fuck.  
Break: smash, fracture, rupture, split, crack, sever, destroy, breach, collapse, crush.

“Gerard, are you okay?”

The can slipped from my fingers and splattered onto the hated floor.

Antonym: mend.

I stood, my legs feeling weak, then bolted for the door, still dressed in His clothes, feeling half-dead and half-drunk, with wide eyes.

“You’re beautiful.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I need to update more often...as always, comments are appreciated.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I forget the last time I felt brave, I just recall insecurity  
> Cause it came down like a tidal wave, and sorrow swept over me  
> Then I was given grace and love, I was blind but now I can see  
> Cause I found a new hope from above, and courage swept over me”

There are certain moments in life when your mind spins and the world bends and the sky breaks right before your eyes. There are also moments when all emotions but hope crash into your skull like a tidal wave, sweeping you off your feet. It is quite rare for these to occur at precisely the same time. At that moment, it did.

“You’re beautiful,” Frank Iero said.

The words rang through my ears, a tidal waves of emotions and the world breaking and I couldn’t say a word. I had been planning to leave forever, for an eternity, away from the teasing mouths and taunting hands and wicked smiles, and then…

“Frank, I-“

“Fuck!” 

“Frank, it’s okay-“

“No, it’s not, Gerard, you can’t just call people beautiful and have it be okay.”

“It is, I promise-“

“No, it’s not, it’s really not…”

“Frank, it’s fine, just…why?”

“Gerard, just forget it, it was nothing, it’s like art-“

“Art’s not nothing!”

My voice came out louder and breathier than I expected it to. Frank was still cowering away from me, terrified of himself and I and what was meant to happen and what was going to happen inevitably.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Gerard, it’s like you’re this fucking…”

He trailed off, biting his lip.

“You know how you came here, with your talks, and your words, and your criticism, and your art, and all? And my life was this big fuckin eggshell white disgusting as hell hated floor, you know? And then you, you fucking beautiful little bitch, you come and you’re this mess of colour right in the goddamn middle, and it makes my life look a lot better, and it’s like you’re some work of art, not some painting of Monet or some modern art that no one glances twice at, you’re the art of-“

The phone rang. Phones always ring at the wrong time. It was Frank Iero’s, and he answered it.

“Yes, I know him. Yes, he works…oh…oh, god, oh fucking hell, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to-“

Frank put down the phone and looked at me with a fiery glare in his eyes that sunk into my soul a hell of a lot deeper than the rising waters of emotion ever would.

I almost believed that he would not speak, but I knew he had to, and I was almost certain that I was sure of what he was about to say. I was certainly and without a doubt wrong.

“Gerard, when I was fourteen years old, I was obsessed with the band Iron Maiden. I lived in this fairly nice apartment complex a bit of a ways from here and I would sit outside on the fire escape, listening to music too loud and smoking cigarettes. I fucking loved it out there, I was all alone, no one to talk to, just me and my too damn loud music. I didn’t have any friends to talk to or hang out with like most fourteen year olds do, so I made friends in other places. Mostly my friends were books, good ones, the kind that take you a good while to read and you don’t mind anyway because you don’t want them to end, not ever. Then there were the friends I made up, not the imaginary friend type, mind you, more the type that you make up in your head as a character for some fantastic comic book you wanna write, or some story concept that sounds awesome in your head, and you kinda just fuck around with the idea of the alternate storyverse that only survives in your mind? Then there was him. I had one other friend, and his name was Jenkins. I talked to him mostly because he’d give me cigarettes in exchange for conversation, not because he was some guy I actually liked or anything, just the cigarettes, that was all. Jenkins was forty-seven years old and wasn’t married. He could’ve had a girlfriend or something, but I didn’t know. We mostly talked in the form of hellos and music recommendations. I don’t even know if he had a last name, and if he did, I had no clue what it was. He was only Jenkins, and he lived in apartment 226A. I lived in 228A so it was fairly easy to pass by there on my way to the fire escape and strike a conversation before striking a match, lighting a cigarette, and rereading some novel to the tune of From Here To Eternity. I remember, I was in this great section of the Catcher in the Rye when it happened… I was listening to some metal song that I didn’t much like, but when you’re a teenager, it doesn’t matter what’s blasting into your ears as long as it isn’t insults or insanity. And then….then… Jenkins got behind me… I was too into the goddamn book to notice he was there at all, and then he covered my mouth so I couldn’t scream and tore at my leather jacket and pathetic hair and he…he fucking…he fucking raped me, and I remember…my book, dog-ear-folded at the part that I was in the middle of…fell down and hit the pavement. I watched it hit the pavement and that was when the tears broke in my eyes and I realised I was counting the seconds and I don’t remember exactly but I do know that it took me two weeks to tell anybody at all and by that time he was gone…he left me a pack of cigarettes too…”

“Frank, I’m so fucking sorry and I know how it feels to be used like that, but why are you telling me this right now?”

“Who. The. Hell. Is. Andrew. Lee. Roth. Finn.”

There are certain moments in life when your mind spins and the world bends and the sky breaks right before your eyes. There are also moments when all emotions but hope crash into your skull like a tidal wave, sweeping you off your feet. The third type of moment makes you feel utterly sick to your stomach and forces you to scream yet there is no air to breathe and there are no words left to say. It is quite impossible for these to occur at precisely the same time. At that moment, it did.

“I-“

“Get the fuck out.”

Sometimes it’s better not to look back. I did anyway. He was crying.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for smut, but it's not underage.

Instead of drowning myself in drink, I drowned myself in poetry. I had quit my job at the bookstore and gotten one at the diner. I had given up Frank and instead spent my nights soaking up words from the library around the street from the apartment I had recently rented. It was two weeks since he had thrown me out. Two weeks since we had spoken. Two weeks since I had drank. Two weeks spent painting over my whole life and smearing Frank out and it all with bright clean eggshell white paint. And I pretended not to hate it, though I certainly did.

I had grown accustomed to my apartment building, even though my apartment was quite near to the fire escape, which had brought flashes of memories that were not even my own into my mind. He was not in my life, but I could still hear him, in my dreams, in my mind, and in the fire escape, listening to Iron Maiden too loud and then it all being muffled…

The most hurt people know how to hurt the most.

It was a line in a poem I had read, hidden in a thick book of mostly awful poems, and it reminded me of him. 

‘the most hurt people know how to hurt the most  
they have time in their minds, where no one dares to wander  
for their thoughts are filled with ghosts of their life that lives no longer’

I read it and immediately thought: ‘His poem was better.’

I had it etched into my mind and my skull and my world, tracing my tongue over words that I had dared to call less than perfect.

***

“When you're a kid, slogans jump out at you,” I had said aloud the night after he had kicked me out for eternity, staring at the mirror in the bathroom, watching the beautiful poem spill over my lips and trickle invisibily into the air. “Ones on TV, mostly, that box that fills your mind with nothing but the smaller picture, because you can't handle the bigger picture if it won't fit inside your skull. And slogans like Asshole! Fag! Egocentric dick! stick in your mind more than jingles, turning your life into a shitty laugh track that laughs at all the wrong things.”

My fist had swung out and smashed the mirror, leaving glass to shatter over the bathroom sink and mirror and all over the floor. 

“Dammit,” I had whispered, my face feeling hot from the involuntary tears sliding down my face and trickling not-so-invisibly into the air.

I had stared back up at the mirror, my red eyes bleeding wet tears and my knuckles crying wet blood. It was smashed, broken, fucked up, and I had still appeared in the midst of it, blurry and cracked.

“When you're a kid, you're torn apart. You just don't know it yet.”

***

There were thin scars still on my hands, interwebbing like I was a real-life Spiderman, dancing and intertwining with their own kind. If I held my hand up to my face for long enough, the light pink lines would sew themselves into my brain so that when I blinked they would flash invertedly as a reminder and a curse and a twisted sort of art.

I had checked out a book from the library entitled ‘Ten Poems Of Chemical Romance’ and they were all in French. I barely spoke French, despite years of lessons in middle school, so I had checked out a French-to-English dictionary along with it.

I was sitting on the floor of my apartment, dissecting the ten poems into English. Through translation they would come out half-broken, the way I liked them. Imperfect. Given a different meaning, one just for my lips to trace. It was at that moment when I came across a particular poem.

'si vous êtes un nuage, je suis le soleil  
et je peux percer vous  
vous déchirer avec des rayons comme des poignards et de la lumière comme un couteau dans le dos  
mais je ne suis qu'un homme, et vous seul un enfant’

“If you are a cloud, I am the sun,“ I muttered, flipping through the dictionary and glancing repeatedly at the book of Chemical Romance. “and I can break you, rip you with rays like daggers and light like a knife in the back. But I'm only human, and you alone a child.”

I glanced down at my hands, smeared black from the slippery old ink in the poetry book. Survivally black.

“You alone a child,” I whispered.

I walked over to the eggshell white table and picked up the card laying on it casually. I walked downstairs to the lobby of the apartment complex and used the pay phone to dial the number carefully.

“’Lo?” came the swift, scratchy answer.

***

I placed the poetry book on the table where I had put the card before, and stuck the card into the book to mark the poem that I had dissected. My hands were twitching nervously. What if he looked at them and thought that they were made by my own desire…in a way, they were, but not in THAT way. I had always been afraid of blades and needles and the like, so I didn’t want to press one into my skin any time soon. I pulled off my jacket and shifted in the chair. I shouldn’t have been this nervous, but I was.

I had given him my room number and he told me he’d be there in an hour. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth twice, with two different toothbrushes that had come in a combo pack at the store, one blue, one red. I washed my hands three times, which was kind of ironic, combed my hair, rinsed my mouth twice more, and splashed water on my face.

He knocked on my door at exactly 10:27; he was two minutes late. His shrimpy face looked not-so-shrimpy and more so beautiful in the dim light and he was wearing skinny jeans that showed off his ass, with a Green Day shirt to match the alternative punk look he appeared to be going for. But his hair wasn’t survivally black. It was dark brown, but light enough so that it would glow reddish in the lights of the city air. That was what drew me to him, his glow.

“Do you want a drink?” I asked in a small voice.

“No, thank you,” said the man.

I didn’t know his name and he knew mine, which made him at an unfair advantage…no, I was definitely at the advantage here. I realised I had no idea what on earth to do, so I kissed him.

He kissed back harder, his hands pushing me into the hideous wall, snaking up my shirt and sliding it off and tossing it carelessly onto the ground. He knew what he was doing and I was supposed to be the one who was to know. I wrapped my arms around him tighter, pushing him into the terribly coloured couch and pulling off his Green Day shirt, kissing my way up through his not-so-surviving hair. I felt his hands slide down to my belt buckle, and the rest of him followed. His mouth wrapped slowly around my cock and his tongue swirled in a way that felt like fucking art but was really utter bullshit and fakery. Suddenly we were a tangle of hips and mouths and moans, sliding together in ectasy that was not ectasy and love that was not love and it was nothing, really. Nothing, except friction, and city lights.

When it was over, I asked if he wanted a drink again, and he declined again. I asked for his name and he didn’t give me the same phony hooker answer as before, he said it was Andrew Jenkins, and what a coincidence, I felt like vomiting over the fire escape. It was two bullets, reminding me immediately of Frank Iero and his tears and his sharp words and his art and his tragically kissed eyes.

I told Andrew Jenkins that I had forgotten to pay in advance, and asked how much. He spat out a random variable and I gave him a wad of cash that was probably worth a lot more than he asked for, and he disappeared into the city air again with his glowing beauty and his attempt at being punk, probably off to get fucked by another guy.

Fucked is the word used for things like this. Not making love or whatever coat of sugar you wanna spread thickly on it. It wasn’t love that we made and both of us knew that. But I was only human, and he alone a child.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are appreciated, as always.
> 
> \- Elle


	11. Chapter 11

It was two o’clock in the morning when I felt it sinking into me like daggers into my soul.

I had shamelessly fucked a hooker. 

I had ripped at and collided with a complete stranger who did not love me and whom I did not love and who I did not know and whom deserved more money than I gave him, to get a fucking job or some shit, not be tied up and fucked by some other freak right this very moment. 

I had hurt someone, someone who didn’t want sex, did it for money, because they needed to, not because they wanted to, because they needed me to pay them, to keep them alive. 

Living comes with a price.

I stood up, legs feeling wobbly, scared as hell, hands shaking like mad, terrified of myself.

I hadn’t abused Andrew Lee Roth, but I had used Andrew Jenkins. 

I was just as bad as any of them, twice as bad. I deserved to be in jail, paying for sex like I did. 

He didn’t deserve to have to do this.

I needed a drink.

Before I knew what the fuck was going on, my head was spinning with a blur of slurred thoughts. Goddamnit…I needed to see Frank. No, not just see Frank, bring him a fucking pint of ice cream and a bouquet of roses and say ‘sorry I was convicted of rape I swear I didn’t do it’ and have him not fucking believe me but it wouldn’t matter because I’d get to see him. It wouldn’t matter if he believed or not. Kids believe a lot of things but the truth is almost never one of them.

I needed to show Frank art, show him that I was both beautiful and not beautiful, show him that it doesn’t matter, nothing does.

I needed to show him that was he wrote was beautiful and that I was bullshit and that was all I ever was and that he was fucking art in himself!

I needed to tell him about his eyes.

I needed him.

I wrote him a poem.

Originally, it was going to be in French, but Frank obviously wouldn’t understand it that way. 

The poem was both a cry for help and a cry for mercy, a reply to his question, a question to the answer he had said without me asking, a twisted amount of words that would convey one emotion.

Of course, I was also drunk.

***

I knocked clumsily on Frank Iero’s door.

“Hello?” I said, too loudly.

I knocked again, louder.

There was no way Frank was asleep, he would’ve been back from his shift around now, right? I knocked again.

“FRANK.”

No response. I couldn’t hear anything behind the door.

“FRANK IERO.”

I was shamelessly banging on the door with all the soul I had, I had come here for a reason, I had taken out my heart and sewed it to his sleeve because his was lost, and he wouldn’t even open the door. I started to cry, kicking it as hard as I could, and then it broke simultaneously with myself.

Frank Iero was covered in blood.

I don’t remember running towards him. It was like I was in a stop motion film, jumping around from place to place awkwardly, and then I was leaning over him, looking at his closed eyelids. 

He was breathing. 

He was breathing.

But it was shallow, ragged, not in an alive-and-healthy way, and he needed to get to the emergency room, fuck. I lifted his head from the ground and picked him up. Thank god he was small. There was still blood running from his arms though I think I remember washing it off and covering it before I started running. I was almost positive that I knew where the emergency room was. No one looked at me sideways, no one stopped me, no one attempted to help. I was alone. So was he.

“I HAVE AN UNDERAGE KID WHO ATTEMPTED SUICIDE,” I think I screamed, and they asked me what relation I was.

“I’m a friend,” I said.

There was blood, blood, gallons of blood, spilling all over everywhere, drowning me, filling my throat with its sickly black smell and its thick salty essence, spilling over his arms, my arms, I felt fucking dead, but I was the one who was alive. There were hours, hours of waiting, hours of bandages and nurses and sympathy and sickening feelings in my chest.

Did I make him do this?

I couldn’t have.

But I most certainly did.

He called his dad, with those white bandages lacing over his arms, binding him to the forever reputation suicide attempts give you. His father asked how he got here and I didn’t hear his response. I didn’t care. He was alive. 

He was alive. That was all.

***

My poem was written in ink, but bits were crossed out. I had been drunk and all.

I knocked on his door. He opened it and looked at me with nothing in his eyes.

“If sheets were locks, we would be the keys that turned in them, waves that crash like the sun in your eyes. But no one notices when they’re taking a picture, until it doesn’t come out perfect. How many times can you start over? How many times can you turn in the sheets before the locks break? You won’t tell me, that is your secret, kept inside your soul, guarded with worse than a lock. If I could write your soul, empty the secrets, let in the light through windows painted survivally black, I would make you imperfect, for in all perfection there are flaws, and it appears through these jail-wraught eyes that there are none.”

“Gerard.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“But you did-“

“I didn’t do it.”

“You said in court-“

“I didn’t do it, Frank, I’d lie to a judge, but I’d never lie to you.”

“That’s not why I told you to leave.”

“Why, then?”

“Because, Gerard.”

His eyes weren’t empty anymore. They were full of tears and light and hate, but this time not for me, only for himself.

“Because I think you’re beautiful. Not in the art way, in the real way, the way that you can look at someone and not ever want to look away, the way that you can see inside their heart before they can see anything else, the way that I see you is beautiful, and exactly like that, but much worse.”

“Frank, I can’t-“

“Gerard.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to write my soul. Make me something different. Make me yours.”

“I’m not that beautiful of a writer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments are appreciated yes

**Author's Note:**

> Long fic I'm writing. Underage relationship involved, so if you don't like, don't read. Feedback is GREATLY appreciated.


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